Eclipse Live Streaming Project – Part 4

Access to the rooftop is restricted and must be managed carefully. A whole team has been working on this project, which includes videographers and engineers. Having the vision to do this is one thing. Implementing it is another thing entirely. The team has been working tirelessly to set up equipment and run the necessary cabling […]

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The view from the rooftop showing the exact spot we will be placing the 360 camera. The roof of Weatherford Hall can be see on the left and you can barely see the roof of Austin Hall on the right. In the distance is Reser Stadium, and the green field before it is Student Legacy Park where the University’s Eclipse Festival will happen.

Access to the rooftop is restricted and must be managed carefully. A whole team has been working on this project, which includes videographers and engineers. Having the vision to do this is one thing. Implementing it is another thing entirely. The team has been working tirelessly to set up equipment and run the necessary cabling to the rooftop to make this possible. The rooftop already has power outlets, but network ports and – as it turns out – coaxial cable were also necessary.

Everything would be run from a utility room on the roof, through conduit, to the server room immediately below. Our testing was being done in the server room so moving things upstairs to the utility room meant nothing would change other than we’d be 20 feet further down an Ethernet cable.

Our testing also gave us an opportunity to see how long it would take us to set up. We’d done the testing so often now that in 20 minutes we were ready to start streaming.

Come the morning of the 21st, wearing a harness, tethered to a safety line, and under close supervision, we would move everything out to the edge of the rooftop, secure everything with tie-downs, and being our stream.

And then a new opportunity presented itself: a new 4K capable 360 camera not yet on the market would be arriving on the day before the eclipse. The Panasonic AW-360C10 (and it’s companion AW-360B10 base) is a high end professional 4K 360-degree system. But could we get it set up and running in time?